Free Apocalypsis 1.03 Thoth by Mario Giordano Page A

Bühler threw another icy look at Peter, rose to his feet and left the room. The two commissarios followed him.
    What now? What was the point of that?
    They made him wait. Time passed, or it didn’t. They had taken his wristwatch. Peter estimated that it was long after midnight. The wait increased his tiredness but he forced himself to stay alert. At some point, he heard Bühler’s voice outside, hollow and loud. He couldn’t understand what Bühler was saying. But he sounded upset and angry.
    Only seconds later, the door flew open and a young woman in a gray suit entered the room. A woman Peter had seen once before.
    The beautiful Roman woman!
    »My name is Alessia Bertoni,« she said without greeting him or paying any mind to his surprise. She presented him with a document and handed him a pen.
    »Sign this and we can go.«
    »Who the hell are you?«
    »I am your lawyer.«
    »Who sent you?«
    »I would suggest that we talk about these things outside. Please sign this agreement, Signor Adam.«
    Peter was too baffled to continue arguing. Assuming that Don Luigi had pulled a few strings, he briefly checked the document. It was a representation agreement between him and a Roman law firm. Peter’s full name and his home address in Hamburg had already been inserted into the form. Nonetheless, he hesitated to sign the paper.
    »Why would the police let me go? They’re accusing me of murder.«
    »There are, of course, restrictions. For the moment, you may not leave your hotel.«
    »That’s it?«
    »Only if you sign.« Now she sounded impatient.
    Bühler was waiting with the two commissarios in front of the interrogation room, and he glared at Peter with suppressed rage. Bertoni strode right past him without deigning to look at him and made the older commissario sign two documents.
    What’s going on here?
    A black SUV with tinted windows was waiting for them at the rear exit of the building. Peter had just seen his new lawyer get into it. Except for the driver, no one else was in the car.
    »Where are we going?« Peter asked, as they left the grounds of the Questura di Roma .
    »To your hotel.«
    »Now will you tell me who hired you?«
    Alessia Bertoni turned to Peter and smiled, for the first time since she had entered the interrogation room. She seemed relieved to have done her job without any major difficulties.
    »You have something on your neck…,« she said gently.
    »Really?« Peter was briefly irritated. »Where?« he asked and bent forward.
    »There!« said his beautiful lawyer and rammed the injection needle into his neck.

XXIV
    May 12, 2011, Rome
    T he hours after the compline, the last prayer of the daily Liturgy of the Hours, had always been her favorite time of day. When the monastery was enveloped in a silence that felt like a sheltering mantle. When she had the freedom to sit alone in her cell and to listen to the night and exhale the images of the day in prayer. In prayers that contained an outrageous secret that she never included in any of her confessions.
    In Uganda, the nights had always come early, mild and cloudless nights which had been filled with the scent of clayey earth and smoke, countless stars and the intermittent screams of hyenas. Strangely enough, Maria had liked the hyenas for they, too, were creatures of God and had their place in this world like any other living being, fulfilling God’s magnificent plan. Not so the militia of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who were in Maria’s eyes the brood of Satan. Perhaps not the adolescent boys with their machetes and their dead eyes, who deserved everyone’s compassion, but each and every one of the older sergeants who were pumped up with drugs and hatred. For Maria, they were all personified demons, and the worst of them was their leader, Joseph Kony, the Beast incarnate.
    Despite the ever-present suffering, despite the mutilations and the rapes, and despite the genocide committed by the LRA, Maria had enjoyed her time in Uganda. Because she felt